"Innocent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Turow Scott)

CHAPTER 6

Tommy, October 13, 2008

Jim Brand applied to the PA's office out of the bottom of his night law school class and received a form rejection. But he showed up in the reception area to beg for an interview, and Tommy, passing by, liked what he saw. It was Tommy who pushed Brand through the hiring committee, taught him how to write a decent brief, made Jim the puppy lawyer on a number of big cases. And Brand, in time, proved out. He had a natural feeling for the courtroom, with the instincts of a jock who knew when there was trouble on his blind side. Defense lawyers lamented his smash-mouth style, but they said that about Tommy, too.

But unlike most people you do a favor, Jim Brand never forgot who he owed. Tommy was his big brother. They had been best men at each other's weddings. Even now, once a month, at least, Tommy and Brand had lunch by themselves, both as a way to keep up with each other and to noodle on the office's recurring problems, which were otherwise easily ignored in the onrush of emergencies. Usually they had a quick sandwich nearby, but today Brand left a message with the secretaries for Tommy to meet him downstairs at noon. Jim was just nosing his Mercedes out of the concrete parking structure abutting the County Building and the courthouse when Tommy got to the street.

"Where to?" Tommy asked from the passenger seat. Brand loved this car, a 2006 E-Class that he'd bought cheap after a three-month quest involving constant conversations about what he'd turned up on the Internet or in want ads. He and his girls polished it every Sunday, and he'd found a leather cleaner that gave the vehicle that new-car smell. The auto was so pristine, Tommy was not comfortable even crossing his legs, for fear his shoes might leave dust on the seat cushion. About the happiest day of Brand's life came when he was pulling out one evening and some toothless wino teetered by and said, 'Hey, man, that's some slick sled.' Brand still repeated the line all the time.

"I was thinking Giaccolone's," said Brand.

"Oh, God." At Giaccolone's they stuck an entire veal cutlet in an Italian roll and buried it in marinara. As a young PA, Tommy would take the dicks who'd worked on a case over there whenever a jury went out, but these days one sandwich was an entire week's calorie count. "I'm gonna feel like a boa constrictor trying to digest a horse."

"You're going to enjoy lunch," said Brand, which was the first clue Tommy had that something was up.

Giaccolone's was not very far from the U, and the famine appetites of undergraduates had sustained the place years ago, when it required youthful bravado or armed companions to enter the neighborhood. Back then it was a mess around here. The playground across the street was a weed-choked empty lot, with purple thistles growing beside refuse dumped in the middle of the night-worn wheel drums and chunks of stressed concrete with the rusty rebar sticking out. Now there were sleek town houses over there, and Tony Giaccolone, the third generation in the business, had done the unthinkable and added salads to the huge menu that hung over the counter. The U Medical Center, whose free-form architectural style resembled a bunch of Tomaso's blocks dumped on the floor, had crept within a few hundred yards, morphing and expanding like one of the cancers they were famous for treating there.

Around the back of Giaccolone's there were concrete picnic tables. With their sandwiches, each dense as a brick, Brand and Tommy headed that way. A copper-colored Buddha in a suit sprang to his feet as they approached.

"Hey there," said Brand. "Boss, you remember Marco Cantu, right? Marco, you know the PA."

"Hey, Tom." Cantu wound up and smashed his hand into Tommy's. In Marco's days on the force, he had been known as No Cantu, smart enough but legendary lazy, the kind of cop who proved they shouldn't have put air-conditioning in the cruisers, because in the summer Marco wouldn't get out even to stop a murder. He had landed on his feet somewhere, though. Tommy remembered that much. Put in his twenty, then rode the diversity wave into paradise.

"Veep for security at the Gresham," said Cantu when Tommy asked what he was up to these days. The Gresham was a classic hotel, built around a magnificent lobby where the marble pillars rose tall as sequoias. Tommy was over there now and then for bar association functions, but you needed a corporate expense account to pay for the rooms.

"That must be a tough gig," said Molto. "Once a month, you go into crisis mode when you need to whisper to some drunken executive that it's time to leave the bar."

"Actually," said Marco, "I got a staff of four to do that. I just listen in on my earpiece." Cantu had the device in his pocket and held it up for a second for laughs.

"What about celebrities?" asked Brand, who was always starstruck. "You must get a few."

"Oh, yeah," said Marco. "And they can be a handful." He told the story of a nineteen-year-old rock star who clubbed his way around town one night and decided when he returned at three a.m., utterly toasted, that it was a good idea to remove every stitch of clothing in the lobby. "I didn't know what to do first," said Marco, "block the paparazzi or turn up the heat to keep the kid from catching cold. What a little twerp."

"You get some local celebrities, too," said Brand. "Didn't you tell me you were running into the chief judge of the appellate court all the time over there spring before last?"

"Truly," said Marco. "Seemed like whenever I seen him, there was this chiquita on his arm."

Brand's dark eyes found Tommy's. Molto knew now why they were here.

"How young?" asked Tommy.

"Past voting age. I don't know. Thirty? Good-looking, with a great set of headlights. First time, I seen him just sittin around in the lobby. That don't make sense, right? Chief judge gotta be a busy fella. I went over to gab. But I could see his eyes rolling sideways, looking somebody off. I bent down to straighten my trouser cuff and could make this chick pedaling backward, headed for the elevator.

"Then a couple of weeks later, I'm up on one of the floors, checking out some jet-lagged Asian businessman who didn't answer his wake-up call, and as the elevator doors open, I can see this couple breaking apart, scurrying to their corners. Judge and her. She was literally sticking her blouse back in her skirt, and old chiefy, he's got that look, you know, Bladder, don't fail me now. Couple weeks later, I catch sight of him marchin into the lobby, and when he sees me, he literally makes like a ballerina and whirls full around and goes back out the revolving doors. The chick, though-she's at reception."

"What time of day was this happening?" Tommy asked, making a wary survey of the customers around them. At the next table there was a group from the hospital, all in their long white coats with their instruments in the breast pockets. They were teasing one another, laughing it up, and took no account of the PA within ten feet of them.

"Lunch twice. Last time was right after work."

"The judge is catching a nooner?"

"How it looked to me," said Marco.

Tommy took his time with his warring judgments. It didn't surprise him Rusty was a hypocrite, that he'd run for supreme court and fuck around at the same time. Some guys were like that, little head first and only. The idea of cheating on his wife was incomprehensible to Tommy, literally beyond the compass of any desire. Why? What could be more precious than a wife's love? Overall, this whole story merely confirmed his judgment that Rusty Sabich was an asshole.

"Seems to me," said Tommy, "I've been to bar association luncheons in that hotel?"

"Sure. All the time."

"Conference rooms always full, night and day?"

"Back then, yeah. Right now business could use a little boost."

"Okay," said Tommy, "but there are a lot of reasons for this young woman and him to be roaming around there. Any chance you took a peek at your registration records, Marco, to see if the judge actually checked in?"

"Yeah. But like I said, it was the girl at the desk."

"That mean there's no record?"

"No record."

Tommy looked at Brand, who was happy enough with the way things were going to resume an eager assault on his sandwich. Even at this age, Jimmy was always famished. Molto had a lot to say, but not in front of Marco. They talked about the U's football team, until Cantu folded up the waxed paper and what little was left of the bun. Ready to go, Marco rested his hands on his wide thighs..

"You know, I never liked the way Rusty fucked with you at that trial," said Cantu. "So I didn't mind telling a couple of guys this story with a cold one in my hand."

"I appreciate it," said Tommy, although the machinery inside him was going tilt.

He figured Cantu was just putting a spit polish on his own grudge with Sabich.

"But the hotel," Marco said. "'The privacy of our guests.'" With his thick fingers, Cantu danced the quotation marks in the air. "Super-duper big deal. Like it's some goddamn Swiss bank or something. So, anything ever hits the fan, I didn't tell you. You need this on paper, send a dick around, and I'll go run to my boss so he can run to his boss. Comes out same in the wash, but you know how it goes."

"Got it," said Molto, and watched Marco walk off in his nice suit.

Tommy threw away the rest of his sandwich and motioned Brand back to his car. Jim had parked the Mercedes across the street in a NO-PARKING zone, where he could watch it. Getting in, Brand scraped up the placard he'd thrown on the dash- KINDLE COUNTY UNIFIED POLICE-OFFICIAL BUSINESS-and slipped it back behind his visor.

"You know, that guy was no kind of cop when he was on the street," Tommy told him.

"I'd say a sack of dung," said Brand, "only the dung might complain."

"And there's some bad mojo between Rusty and him, right?"

"That's my read. The first time we talked it through, Marco let on about Sabich calling him out on a motion to suppress when Rusty was a trial judge."

"Okay, so maybe No Cantu is seeing a little more than meets another guy's eye."

"Maybe, maybe not. But you know, if he's right, it's a motive to adios Mrs. Judge."

"Whatever you call it, it was a year and a half ago. And that's not much of a motive for murder. Ever hear of divorce?"

"Not with my wife," said Brand. "She'd kick my ass." Jody, a former deputy PA, was a hard case. "Maybe Rusty thought a divorce would disagree with his campaign."

"So he could wait six weeks."

"Maybe he couldn't. Maybe the young lady's with child and starting to show."

"Lot of maybes here, Jimmy."

They were on Madison now, right across from the main doors of U Hospital. There was a crowd on the corner waiting for the light, docs and patients and workers by the looks of them, and every single person, eight when Molto counted, was talking on a cell phone. Whatever happened to the here and now?

"Boss," said Brand, "Rusty's not gonna get executed at midnight on this. But you said, Bring me somethin. And this is something. We got a guy here with a track record for murder. Now his wife dies all of a sudden and he lets the body cool an entire day for no good reason. And turns out, he was getting some play on the side. So maybe he wanted an easy trade-in. I don't know. But we gotta look. That's all I'm saying. We got a job to do and we gotta look."

Tommy gazed down the broad avenue canopied by the solid old trees that rose in the parkway on either side. It just would have been worlds easier if it were somebody else.

"How'd this information come to you, anyway?" he asked. "Who pointed you at Marco?"

"One of the Nearing cops shoots pool with Cantu every Tuesday night."

Tommy didn't like that part. "I hope they're all talking in their quiet voices. I don't want half the Nearing station bopping around, asking every second person they see if they got any reason to think Rusty Sabich cooled his wife."

Brand promised he had the lid screwed down tight. The best Tommy could tell himself was that it hadn't hit the press yet. He asked Brand what he wanted to do.

"I say it's time to pull his bank records, his phone records," said Jim. "Let's see if there really is a mystery girl and whether they're still making time. We can put a ninety-day letter on everybody, keep them from telling Rusty until after the election." Under the state version of the Patriot Act, the PAs had the right to subpoena documents and order the person providing them to tell no one but a lawyer for ninety days. It was a pale version of what the feds could do-they had the right to keep the subpoenas secret forever-but the local criminal defense lawyers had raised hell, as usual, up at the capital.

Tommy groaned and quoted Machiavelli, an Italian who knew what was what. "If you shoot at the king, you better kill the king."

But Brand was shaking his big bald head.

"Assume the worst, Boss, assume it's a dry hole. Rusty'll be pissed when he finds out, maybe he pokes us in the eye now and then, but he's not going anywhere to complain. He's on the supreme court, he didn't get hurt, and he's not advertising that once upon a time, while his missus was still breathing, he had a girlfriend. He'll just hate your guts a little more than he hates your guts already."

"Great."

"We got a job, Boss. We got some information."

"Half-ass information."

"Half-ass or not, we have to run it out. You want some Nearing copper crying in a reporter's beer six months from now about how they turned up some good shit on the new justice before he got elected and you needed a heart transplant because you didn't want big bad Rusty to paddle your ass again? That's not good either."

Brand was right. They had a job to do. But it was a peril. The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool.

Tommy waited all the way back to the courthouse before he gave Brand permission to proceed.